Succumbing to Policy Pressures: Institutional Explanations of Nonstructural School Transfers

• In Event: Moscone Center West Roundtable Session 7
  In Roundtable Session: Examining Key Educational Issues on How Bodies Are Supported and Regulated

Abstract

School transfers decrease students’ educational engagement and increase their odds of dropping out. Moreover, transfers are concentrated among students of color and low-income populations (Gasper, Deluca, and Estacion 2012; Hanushek, Kain, and Rivkin 2004). Prevailing explanations for how transfers occur focus on student characteristics, overlooking the organizational and institutional forces that catalyze mobility. The few studies that look beyond students argue that schools use transfers to construct organizational authority (Bowditch 1993; Fine 1991). Integrating ethnographic and interrupted time series analyses, I demonstrate that institutional pressures originating far beyond schools’ walls also produce transfers. Focusing on school discipline reform and accountability policies, I illuminate how schools utilize transfers as “shadow expulsion”, and as a way to improve performance on accountability metrics.

Author

• Meg Caven, Brown University